There are personally and culturally conditioned parts of us that hold onto a problem orientation. If we want to think in evolutionary terms, the habit of having a problem probably goes very deep. There is …
How to Move Beyond Vicious Intellectualism
There are things that we know. And there are things that we know that we don’t know. And there are things that we don’t know that we don’t know. Those things that we don’t even …
What is Radical Inclusivity? Introducing a New Reality
Radical Inclusivity is a philosophical perspective and an awakening experience that opens a portal to a new reality. My passion for philosophy is fueled by my recognition that the reality we live in needs to …
How do we prepare for a shift in consciousness?
The idea that we need to shift human consciousness has become cliché. We’ve all heard Einstein’s declaration that problems cannot be solved by the same consciousness that created them. But just because something has become …
What counts as a being?
I believe that the most important philosophical question of our time is, what counts as a being? A thing is an object. It doesn’t count as a being. We can use things, manipulate them and …
Beyond Human Perspectives
This short book can be seen as, and in fact in many ways is, my personal introduction to the philosophy called speculative realism. This new philosophy has only been defined and developed during the course …
Beyond the Brain’s Picture of Reality
It is much more exciting to question the whole of reality than it is to question any number of its parts. That might be why there has been such a surge in popularity in the …
The Expansion of Mind
In the 18th century Immanuel Kant articulated a magnificent vision of how the human mind keeps us contained within a single worldview. Kant realized that we don’t see the world as it is. Instead we …
Even More About Radical Inclusivity
The realization of Radical Inclusivity is the recognition that you are already inside (although what inside means can shift with context and circumstance) and there is no way out. It is the ultimate endgame that …
The Experience of Radical Inclusivity
The first time I was engulfed by the realization of Radical Inclusivity was during a 60-day meditation retreat. Under the guidance of my spiritual teacher I sat from morning until evening following the simple instruction, …
The Emancipation of Imagination
In 1817 the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge described “the willing suspension of disbelief” as an act of “poetic faith” through which a reader’s accepts fanciful aspects of a fictional work. Without this willingness the …
Are you a Romantic? You are if…
In the late eighteenth century a literary and philosophical movement called Romanticism began. This movement was the emergence of a new consciousness in part spurred by the failings of the European Enlightenment. It lived in …
The Holistic Evolution of Charles Sanders Peirce
The American Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce did not see the universe as collection of separate but interconnected things that evolved together. He saw a continuous whole universe with three essential characteristics that co-emerge. All of …
The Source of Creativity in the Universe
The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce believed that the universe was evolving – the whole universe, not just the things in it. He believed that the universe itself, including the seemingly immutable laws of time, …
Romanticism and the Human Soul
Most of us know Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the English Romantic poet and author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We may not be aware that he was also an important English theologian who …
Intuition and Understanding: two ways of knowing
In 1825 Samuel Taylor Coleridge published “Aids to Reflection” and put forth his answer to the question. of whether we are stuff that got smart, or smarts that grew stuff, by proposing that there are actually two …
Seeing through Sentences in your Head
One of the things that the study of philosophy reveals is the profound relationship between the language that we use and our perception of what is real. We don’t have to look too deeply into …
Are we stuff that got smart? Or smarts that grew stuff?
One of the most confounding philosophical questions is the one about who we are, and how we got here. Are we intelligent matter – stuff that got smart – or are we incarnate spirit – …
How do we know what we think we know?
How do we know what we think we know? We think we know things, but do we really? What do we know, and more importantly how do we know that we know it? Think of …
To thing or not to thing? That is the question.
One of the greatest human skills is the ability to thing. We are thinging beings. We thing all the time. We thing the natural world into pieces. We saw a tall plant and we defined …